League for Combating Jewish Suicide Formed in Poland

A League to combat the epidemic of suicides which has been afflicting Polish Jewish for several years past, has been constituted here on the initiative of the Rabbi of Zwohlin. An organising committee has been elected, in order to launch a big campaign to stem this alarming appearance in Jewish life.

A special meeting has been held of the members of the Executive of the Warsaw Jewish Community, with the President, M. Eli Mazur, in the chair, attended also by Chief Rabbi Professor Schorr, Deputy Waslaw Wiclicki, the President of the Jewish Merchants’ Federation, Ex-Deputy Silberstein, and M. Gitermann, of the Jewish Rescue Committee, to consider immediate action for the relief of the widespread Jewish distress in the city. A committee of nine members has been appointed by the meeting, which will carry on the relief activity among the Jewish unemployed workers and those large numbers of other Jew who have lost all means of earning their livelihood on account of the economic crisis.

Ever since the epidemic of suicides among the Jewish population in Poland began to mount up to an alarming degree, with the economic breakdown in the country, the Rabbis and Jewish social workers have constantly been appealing to the Jewish population not to look to suicide as a way out of their difficulties. As long back as January 1925, the Warsaw Rabbinate issued a solemn appeal to the Jewish population of the country, pointing out that suicide is contrary to the Jewish spirit, and urging Jews who have been rendered desperate by their economic difficulties to take courage and to hold on in the hope of better times coming.

The Rabbis have constantly in the years that have intervened taken the epidemic of suicides among the Jewish population as the text of their sermons, pleading against it in the synagogues as un-Jewish and cowardly.